Who could be anything but delighted to see this headline? A-level results: Malala Yousafzai gets a place at Oxford, this is excellent news and a great boost for those campaigning for equal education. In fact, the publication yesterday of A level results in the UK has spurred me to take a slight diversion from worrying about who is moving my brain or my cheese. I certainly would not want to detract from the hard work that any students have put into their A level studies or to take the shine off their success. It is wonderful to see the smiling faces of successful students across the newspapers.

However, success does not come to all and even on a celebration day, or perhaps I should write especially on a celebration day, I think we need to consider alternatives to the stressful stop and test regime that pervades most education systems. I wrote about this in Nature Human Behaviour earlier this year under the heading: ‘Towards artificial intelligence-based assessment systems’ and it looks like it has been read a few times because it is ranked 5,746th of the 237,966 tracked articles of a similar age in all nature journals which puts it in the 97th percentile. This does not seem bad given that it was only a ‘comment’ piece and not a full paper. On a less positive note in an internal REF assessment exercise it was only ranked as 2*, which is not great and probably reflects the difficulty for academics in publishing more popular style articles. However, the modest success of the article in terms of the altometrics that Nature run encourages me to believe that there is some interest in exploring the possibilities that the intelligent design and application of AI could afford for National assessment systems. I therefore draw attention to this possibility here and hope to encourage further debate. The key point I wanted to convey in the Nature Human Behaviour article was that there are alternatives to exams, that are less stressful, less expensive and that allow teachers and learners to spend more time on teaching and learning (shouldn’t this be the point of education?).

This message may not be what others have selected to focus on, but for me, the most important thing is that we have an assessment system that is holistic, fair and that let’s all students evidence their knowledge, skills and capabilities.

I’m pleased to report that my ankle is progressing well and I am now once again able to achieve my ‘misfit‘ challenge of 1000 activity points per day: clearly it is a good job I was only mildly curious. However, I want to be more than mildly curious when it come to my intellect, and I want to do this without injury. I had therefore better take care, both of my own intellect and of the intellect of those I am trying to encourage to be appropriately curious. I therefore return to my thoughts about what a useful self-help book to prepare people for their AI augmented futures, might be like. To this end, I also return to ‘The AI Race‘ and specifically to the man behind the survey that was used to calculate how much of different people’s jobs are likely to be automated.

Andrew Charlton is his name and he is economist and director of AlphaBeta, an economics and strategy consulting firm. He did not beat about the bush! AI will impact on ALL jobs and he encouraged the TV audience to embrace AI. His ‘top tip’ was that we must carefully manage the transition from now to the situation when widespread AI augmentation will be common place.

He was clear that we must take advantage of what AI has to offer by increasing the diversity of our own skills sets. He saw AI as an “Iron Man Suit” for humans. This suit would transform us mere humans into super humans. This is a great analogy, who would not want to be super human? BUT embracing AI augmented working is not as simple as putting on a new outfit – especially an iron outfit. And increasing the diversity of our skill sets requires educators and trainers who are themselves skilled and trained in developing these new diverse skill sets. BUT where are these educators and trainers to be found? Who is helping the educators and trainers to gain the skills and expertise they will need to train their students in?

Andrew has little comfort to offer here. His next comment about education is that 60% of the curriculum that students are studying at school is developing them for jobs that will no longer exist in 30 years-time. We need to re-design the curriculum he advises. So educators need to re-skill themselves as well as their students, and they need to revise the curriculum. Clearly educators will be busy! And clearly there will also be a significant job to be done in (re-)motivating all those students who discover that they have been learning stuff that nobody will want them to know by the time they are looking for a job.

Now we hit the nub of the matter, education and educators must prepare students for the new AI order of things. Educators lives are going to change in significant ways NOT because their roles are likely to be automated away BUT because they will need to teach a different curriculum and probably teach in a different way. To make matters worst: there is no clear consensus from the experts about exactly which jobs educators will need to educate people for. I think educators may be the most in need of a good self-help book to help them cope with the inevitable changes to their lives.

The original book called ‘Who Moved My Cheese’ was a story featuring 4 characters: two mice, called “Sniff” and “Scurry,” and two little people, called: “Hem” and “Haw.” These 4 characters all live together in a maze through which they all search for cheese (for cheese think – happiness and success). Their search bears fruit when all of them find cheese in “Cheese Station C.” “Hem” and “Haw” are content with this state of affairs and work out a schedule for how much cheese they can eat each day, they enjoy their cheese and relax.

“Sniff” and Scurry” meanwhile remain vigilant and do not relax, but keep their wits about them. When horror of horrors there is no cheese at Cheese Station C one day, “Sniff” and Scurry” are not surprised: they had seen this coming as the cheese supply had diminished and they had prepared themselves for the inevitable arduous cheese hunt through the maze and they get started with the search together straightaway. In contrast “Hem” and “Haw” are angry and annoyed when they find the cheese gone and “Hem” asks: “Who moved my cheese?” “Hem” and “Haw” get angrier and feel that the situation they find themselves in is unfair. “Hem” is unwilling to search for more cheese and would rather wallow in feeling victimized, “Haw” would be willing to search, but is persuaded not to by “Haw”.

While “Hem” and “Haw” get annoyed, “Sniff” and “Scurry” find a new cheese supply at “Cheese Station N,” and enjoy a good feast. “Hem” and “Haw” start to blame each other for their lack of cheese. Once again “Haw” suggests they go and look for more cheese, but grumpy “Hem” is frightened about the unknown and wants to stick with what he knows, he refuses to search. However, one day “Hem” confronts his fears and decides it is time to move on. Before he leaves “Cheese Station C” he scribbles on the wall: “If You Do Not Change, You Can Become Extinct” and “What Would You Do If You Weren’t Afraid?” He starts his trek and whilst he is still worried, he finds some bits of cheese that that keep him going as he searches. He finds some more empty cheese stations, but also some more crumbs and is able to keep hunting. “Haw” has realized that the cheese did not simply vanish, it was eaten. He is able to move beyond his fears and he feels ok. He decides that he should go back to find “Hem” equipped with the morsels of cheese he has found. Sadly, “Hem” is still grumpy and refuses the cheese morsels. Undeterred, though somewhat disappointed, “Haw” heads back into the maze and a life of cheese hunting. He continues to write messages on the wall as a way of externalizing his thinking and in the hope that “Hem” might one day move on and be guided by these messages. One day “Hem” finds Cheese Station N with all its lovely cheese, he reflects on his experience, but decides not to go back to “Hem”, but rather to let “Hem” find his own way. He uses the largest wall in the maze to write the following (original to the left, my re-interpretation to the right):

Who move my cheese?

Who moved my brAIn?

Change Happens: They Keep Moving The Cheese

Computers keep getting smarter and intelligent tasks are moving from human to machine

Anticipate Change: Get Ready For The Cheese To Move

Prepare for some of your intellectual activity to be taken on by AI

Monitor Change: Smell The Cheese Often So You Know When It Is Getting Old

Keep checking in on your own intelligence and make sure you are really using it and keeping it fresh

Adapt To Change Quickly: The Quicker You Let Go Of Old Cheese, The Sooner You Can Enjoy New Cheese

Adapt to change thoughtfully (quickly is not necessarily right here), make sure you offload intellectual activity carefully so that you maintain your human intellectual integrity

Change: Move With The Cheese

Move with the intelligence (both human/natural and machine/artificial)

Be Ready To Change Quickly And Enjoy It Again: They Keep Moving The Cheese

Never feel you are intelligent enough and keep striving for intellectual growth

“Haw” is never complacent and continually monitors his cheese store and searches through the maze and hopes that one day his old friend “Hem” will find his way through and that they will meet again.

Whilst the book “Who moved my cheese” was extremely popular, it was also the subject of considerable criticism. For example, that it was too positive about change, that it was patronizing and compared people inappropriately to ‘rats in a maze’. BUT can I learn anything from this as I try to encourage people to want to understand themselves and their changing intellectual capabilities?

I think there is still value in “Haw’s” writing on the wall and I have tried to clarify this nee value for AI in the right hand column of the table above. I also think perhaps that my original revised title of: “Who moved my brAIn?” is not quite correct. The more important question is “Who moved my intelligence?”.

As a child I was always frustrated by the phrase: “curiosity killed the cat”. This was a frequent retort when I was trying to understand how things worked. Well, I am not reporting any cat killing incidences here, but my curiosity about myself driven by my new ‘misfit’ may have been a primary factor in my newly sprained ankle!

Over enthusiasm to meet that target of 1000 activity points motivated me to get walking and launched me down some steps in a most ungainly and unfortunate manner. No broken bones, but some swelling and plummy bruising have resulted in my needing to rest up for a few days. Resting up in a Sydney winter is hardly a chore, the sun is out and the sky is blue and I indulged in exploring the ABC TV channel and in particular a great program called The AI Race.

The program presented data from a study into the risks to Australian jobs from AI powered automation. I was relieved to see that professors are only likely to have 13% of their job automated, whilst carpenters are predicted to have 55% of what they do done by smart technology. Might this be the same in the Uk, or different I wondered? The ABC reporter explored various jobs and met up with employees. For example, Frank: a truck driver, was not persuaded that autonomous trucks would be able to replace his experience and intuition about the behaviour of other humans whether pedestrian or driver. The autonomous vehicles would not be able to help out other drivers stranded on the roadside or provide human customer service on delivery of a load either. He was definitely not convinced that AI was going to replace him any time soon.

Further jobs were explored: the legal profession for example where law students were stunned by an AI para legal that could search through thousands of documents to find a specific clause in no time at all. The law students berated their education for not preparing them for a world of automation.

On the one hand we have Frank, who does not believe that AI can replace him, and on the other we have a group of law students who are persuaded that AI can already do a lot of what they are studying to be able to do. Nobody seems very curious about how they might better prepare themselves for AI’s onslaught on their workplace. So, how might I persuade them that understanding more about their own intellect could help them work more effectively with AI? The key to future success has to be that people need to focus on developing the expertise that AI cannot achieve: the still unique human qualities that will be at a premium. Self-knowledge and Self-efficacy are important elements of this expertise, but how do we motivate people to develop themselves? To start answering this, I looked at the best selling self-help books for guidance. People buy these so maybe I can learn something about how to appeal from their sites – which of these might work best?

It is far too long since I last posted to this blog: too many jobs and too little time would be my fist attempt at an excuse. But, perhaps it is just that I am not effective enough, that I need better self-regulatory skills, more intelligence and a better understanding of my own strengths and weaknesses. I talk quite a lot about intelligence and about how AI developers have not yet designed artificially intelligence systems that understand themselves and have metacognitive awareness, but maybe I too lack these abilities? So, how might I become more self-effective?

This thought is one that I intend to worry at while I am completing a research trip to the University of Sydney to work with my colleague Judy Kay. We are working on Personal Analytics for Learners (PALs), or more precisely interface designs for PALs (or iPALs).

In order to help me thing this through I wanted to learn more about some of the work that Judy and her colleague Kalina Yacef have been doing in collaboration with medics and health professionals to develop better data analytics and interfaces for personal health information for education. For example, the iEngage project provides a digital platform for children with information, education and skills to help them to achieve their physical activity and nutritional goals. It connects with ‘misfit‘ activity trackers to provide continuous feedback and summarise the daily activity on a dashboard.

To this end, I bought myself a ‘misfit’: a somewhat cheaper version of a ‘fitbit’ with a great name :-). I am now tracking my sleep and my pulse as well as my physical activity and diet in order to try and understand more about my personal wellbeing. This is nothing new and millions of other people do this too. I notice that popular technology stores stock a good range of fitness tracking devices and increasingly more reasonable prices.

So, in order to also help me be better at understanding my mind and my cognitive progression and metacognitive skills and regulation, I now need a ‘mindset” to help me track how well I am thinking, learning and regulating my working and learning. The interface to such a ‘mindset’ is the idea behind the iPAL that Judy and I are currently designing. I find it interesting to speculate about the kinds of data that we could collect about our intellectual and social interactions that would help us track and better understand our intellectual mental wellbeing as well as our physical welding and fitness. This kind of ‘fitbit’ for the mind might help me to be less distracted by non-priority activities and spend more time on priorities, such as writing.

A search for ‘fitbit for the mind’ yields some hits, though not terrifically interesting ones. There is an article in new scientist about eye-tracking to tell you more about your reading habits, and a mindfulness app that can be linked to fitbit data. The problem here is that we are being offered some automatic tracking of just one type of mental activity – reading, or mindfulness and actually we need something way more sophisticated to tell us about how we our intelligence and self-awareness is progressing. Perhaps something that looks at multiple data sources and provides us with an overview of our activity in a way that motivates us to want to know more about our intellectual fitness in the same way that activity trackers help us understand more about our physical fitness.

Earlier this month, there was a more interesting article in Newsweek that talks about ‘iBrain’ and the possibility for us to be able to track our brain’s electrical output and see markers for the likely occurrence of a range of mental health disorders from anxiety, depression, and schizophrenia, to dementia and Alzheimer’s before symptoms appear. Such information might help early intervention and monitoring. This reminds me of the rise of personal DNA services, such as 23 and me. If people are interested in their DNA and what it might tell them about how they should adjust their lifestyles to avoid certain conditions that they look to be susceptible to, then maybe people are also curious about their intelligence and how they can understand it better.

Over the next few blog posts I plan to explore what such a device might be like, what data it might collect and how I might best benefit from the sorts of information it could provide.